July 16, 2024
Look no further if you’re a designer or small business owner struggling to find quality resources that fit your budget. I'm sharing my master list of resources I've used and love, packed with fantastic (and mostly free) tools to help you take your creativity and business to the next level. This article includes resources for fonts, color palettes, mood boards and other inspiration, mockups, images, photo and video editors, and business management.
Free Faces is a collection of totally free, unique, and fun typefaces. Bonus: their site is a design inspiration in itself.
Google Fonts is a free font resource offering web-safe options and integration with third-party apps.
Fonts In Use allows you to search your brand typeface to see real-world use cases and examples.
Typewolf allows you to discover trending typefaces and new releases.
Future Fonts is an online archive of type that is currently being developed. Access free samples of typefaces from both large and small foundries.
Font Brief allows you to search for typefaces by your brand’s personality keywords—fun and a great way to explore different vibes.
Type Foundries - Check out small type foundries online, or by searching on Google, for really custom and unique fonts. They’ll often have free samples of their typefaces that you can use to get started before you commit to buying the typeface.
Coolers Color Palette Generator is an interactive color palette tool that’s easy and fun to use.
Colour Contrast Checker helps ensure your colors meet accessibility standards. Check out my article on Simple Graphic Design Tips Every Small Business Owner Needs to Know to learn why this is important for your business.
Mesh Gradient lets you create and export gradient designs for your website or social media.
Code Beautify has a free Hex to Pantone converter that can be super handy for creating brand guidelines, or communicating with printers to ensure brand consistency. They have a slightly larger library than Studio Red below, but it's a bit less user friendly for comparing and contrasting your palette.
Studio Red is my personal favorite Hex to Pantone converter because it allows you to compare a swatch of your current color with it's possible Pantone equivalents right on the web, streamlining the process.
Pinterest is the ultimate mood board tool. Just make sure you use good keywords for high-quality design content!
Behance is another great option for inspiration. Their homepage is packed with beautiful design resources. Of course, don’t take things right off of here and only use it to get the gears spinning. If you want something that looks exactly like something on Behance, you can hire that designer directly through there :)
Designspiration allows you to search for inspiration by color palette.
Milled is a cool search engine for ecommerce email designs.
MaxiBestOf has lots of inspiration for unique landing pages and websites.
Land-Book is a hand-picked library of beautiful websites updated daily.
Awwwards is a top site for website design inspiration, featuring community-voted projects.
River is an open-source library for mood board inspiration. It may contain NSFW content so browse with caution, but enjoy the fun navigation experience of this site!
Public Work is another awesome open-source library with fun navigation and a search option.
Bendito Mockup offers high-quality, free Photoshop mockups. Just type “free” into the search bar to find free options, but their paid packages are definitely worth it.
Art Directed Design has a great library of high-quality freebie Photoshop mockups that can help add a little more style to your case studies.
Yellow Images has a huge collection of high-quality Photoshop mockups and images. Most are paid, but you receive quality products.
Mockups.Design is a large online library of free high-quality Photoshop mockups. It's mostly focused on print and physical assets though, so another website may be a better option if you're looking to mock up an app, website, or digital product.
Unsplash has high-quality and creative stock images, free to use with creator credit.
Behance is also an awesome option for free assets including mockups, fonts, and vectors.
Pexels offers free stock photos and videos for any project.
Nappy is a stock imagery library focused on diversity and inclusion.
The Noun Project has a huge library of open-source icons available for getting inspired or downloading for your icon needs.
Lightroom Industry standard for professional photographers. It's paid, but if your brand is serious about photography it's definitely worth looking into.
VSCO is a free photo-editing tool to establish a consistent brand style with prefiltered options, but I would always recommend toning them down a bit or adding your own edits to make it really your own. It's easy to tell if things are directly out of the VSCO box.
Premiere Pro is Adobe’s video editor for professional use. This probably isn’t something I’d invest in unless your brand focuses on high-quality video design. There are lots of other free options that can help you get by if you’re just looking to create Reels and TikTok videos.
Splice is a free video editor for quick cuts on social platforms like TikTok or Reels.
Canva (with Caution). A designer’s “hot take” tool—great for non-designers but requires customization to avoid the cookie-cutter look. You have to customize templates to make them fit your brand - or, even better, work with a designer who can create custom social templates for you that you can use in Canva!
Google Meet & Calendar are both simple, accessible tools for client calls and scheduling.
Meta Ads Manager allows you to easily create and manage ads across Facebook and Instagram.
Google Business Account - Set your business up with a Google Business Account! This allows you to localize your business to improve search performance for your area, clients can leave testimonials, and you can use it as a hub for running Google Ads.
Instagram (and other Socials) - Don’t underestimate social media for your business. Instagram's a great option to get started (depending on your business type) and makes your content easily accessible for users while they’re scrolling. For other social media platforms, I would suggest researching what works best for your business. If you want to be more casual and connect with your audience, consider TikTok, but if you’re looking to broadcast a professional brand presence that educates, you might consider something like LinkedIn.
Bonsai is a paid business management software, but it's something that I would always suggest for small businesses or freelance designers to start using. It offers customer relationship management tools, call scheduling, invoicing, tax resources, and contracts that are pre-created by lawyers for all kinds of different businesses (you can customize these as needed too). They also have a partnership with Stride, which allows small business owners and freelancers to get health insurance that they might be missing out on from working for a larger corporation.
I hope this list helps you discover some new tools to elevate your freelancing or small business journey! Got a favorite resource that didn’t make the list? Shoot me an email at hello@freehouse-design.com—I’d love to check it out.
